Cardio or Weights First? Kinesiologist Explains How to Optimize Exercise Order

When you enter the gym, which way should you head first? To the treadmill and spinning studio to sweat out a cardio session? Or to the free weights and strength machines for resistance training?

American College of Sports Medicine suggests doing both types of exercises to take advantage of their unique benefits to improve health and daily functioning and reduce the risk of chronic disease. But what is the optimal order to get the best results?

The answer to that question is… it depends. I am an exercise physiologistRecently in my laboratory we have been investigating the effects of a combination of aerobic and endurance training on improving health, particularly aerobic capacity and muscle strength.

Research suggests that when designing an exercise program, you should consider several factors, including your age, fitness level, exercise history, and goals. You should also consider the volume of your exercise routine—that is, its duration and intensity—and how you schedule your workouts into your day.

Benefits of exercise

First, almost any exercise will be better for you than doing nothing.

Aerobic exercise is a rhythmic activity that gets your heart rate up. Examples include walking, running, swimming, cycling, and using a cardio machine such as an elliptical trainer.

Aerobic exercise can improve your cardiorespiratory function – over time, your heart and lungs will become better at delivering oxygen to your muscles, allowing you to produce the energy needed for sustained muscle contractions. Aerobic exercise can also reduce several risk factors for chronic diseases, augment the amount of energy your body uses and the amount of fat it burns, and improve physical and cognitive functioning.

Resistance training involves strengthening muscles by lifting, pushing, or pulling against resistance. This type of exercise can be done using free weights, dumbbells, kettlebells, strength training machines, and even bands.

Resistance exercises improves muscle strength, endurance, power and muscle size – what exercise physiologists call muscle hypertrophyStudies show that resistance training also has health benefits, especially for people who have or are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. It can improve blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and the ability of muscles to employ glucose for energy, and it also helps maintain lean body mass and bone health.

Training for health benefits

With narrow time to exercise, many people incorporate both cardio and weights into the same exercise session. This simultaneous training has many health benefits, including lowering cardiovascular and metabolic risks.

In fact, doing both forms of exercise at the same time is better, especially for people with risk factors for chronic diseases, than exercising for the same amount of time but limiting yourself to only aerobic or endurance exercise.

Studies on concurrent training suggest a generalized training effect – similar improvements in aerobic capacity and muscular strength, regardless of the order of aerobic and resistance exercise in the session. the benefits apply to a wide range of peopleincluding initially inactive people, recreationally vigorous people, juvenile people and older women and men.

Resistance exercise performed before aerobic exercise causes a diminutive augment lower body muscle strength without compromising health any other improvements related to health and fitness.

So if your exercise goals are related to overall health and deriving the mental benefits of moving your body, resistance training can give you a little boost. But research suggests that, in general, you don’t need to worry too much about which order to focus on—cardio or weights.

Training with performance goals in mind

On the other hand, if you are a performance-oriented athlete training to get better at a particular sport or prepare for a competition, you may want to be more thoughtful about the order in which you perform your exercises.

Studies suggest that for these exercisers, concurrent training may slightly inhibit improvements in aerobic fitness. It is more likely to impede increases in muscle strength and power development, and to a lesser extent, muscle growth. This phenomenon is called “interference effect“This is most evident in well-trained athletes undertaking large volumes of aerobic and endurance exercises exercises.

Scientists are still investigating what happens at the cellular level to cause the interference effect. Aerobic and resistance training release competing influences at the molecular level which affect genetic signaling and protein synthesis. At the beginning of an exercise program, the body’s adaptations are more general. However, with more training, muscle changes become increasingly specific to the type of work being performed, and the likelihood of interference effects increases.

Of course, many sports require a combination of aerobic and muscular capacity. Some elite-level athletes need to improve both. So the question remains: what is the optimal order of these two exercise modes to get the best performance benefits?

Taking into account the research results on parallel training for competitive athletesit makes sense to do resistance training first or train first in the type of exercise that is most vital to your performance goals. Also, if possible, competitive athletes should give their bodies a break of at least three hours between resistance and aerobic training sessions.

Don’t worry about ordering

In my lab, we study what we call “microcycles” of aerobic and resistance exercise. Instead of deciding which to do first, you combine the two modalities in much shorter bursts. For example, one set of resistance exercise is immediately followed by three minutes of walking or running; you repeat this cycle as many times as needed to incorporate all the resistance exercises into your routine.

Our preliminary findings indicate that this method of simultaneous training produces similar effects on aerobic capacity, muscular strength, and lean muscle mass – while appearing to be less demanding – compared to standard concurrent training in which resistance exercise is followed by aerobic exercise.

For most people, my current advice remains to choose the order of exercises based on personal preference and what will keep you coming back to the gym. High-level athletes can avoid any significant disruption by doing their resistance program before their aerobic program or by separating their aerobic and resistance workouts on a given day.